pedantic bore writes: Dennis Ritchie, pioneer of C and UNIX, former leader of the Computer Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs, and winner of the ACM Turing Award, is reported dead at age 70.

Dennis Ritchie was one of the inventors who, without much fanfare and almost no publicity outside of the field, revolutionized operating systems and programming languages. His influence is ubiquitious; C and POSIX are the bedrock of nearly all modern computing platforms.